Can The Moon Hold More Water Than The Earth’s Supply? How Is That Possible?

Water, as we know it, is an essential part of life here on Earth but apart from that, it also comprises and has been considered as a crucial ingredient of the primordial body that split apart 4.5 billion years ago to become Earth and the moon. As what scientists believe in, the moon has been formed when another planet had crashed into our Earth, throwing out debris that eventually merged into our satellite. Just recently, a new study suggests that by recreating the moon in a lab, that the amount of water present in this liquid magma ocean was much greater than we previously thought which can potentially mean the same thing in the real world.

How Was The Study Conducted?

The researchers from Vrije Universiteit, or Free University, in Amsterdam, have allegedly focused on how much water the moon had in its rocks when it first formed. In one of his statements revealed by Daily Mail, co-author of the study Dr. Wim van Westrenen has claimed that people have already found water in some real lunar rocks, and most of those provide us with information about how much water there was in later stages of the evolution of the moon. Dr. Westrenen has added that in conducting their study, they have focused on how much water there was in the moon when it formed, and consequently it turned out be a lot, which he believes was surprising.

Furthermore, New Scientist has revealed that the presence of water has already been detected in samples from the moon before, but experts have emphasized that it's only in young rock from the surface, which does not tell us whether it was there from the beginning or brought by asteroids. It was found that other research has argued that water arrived on the moon by asteroids or comets that hit its surface.

Ultimately, Robin Canup, who studies the origins of planetary bodies at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, explains that this discovery is yet another indication that the moon may have initially been water-rich, with important implications both for our models of lunar origin, and for the possibility there are still water-rich reservoirs on the moon today.